Thursday, February 25, 2010

You have added Exchange Trusted Subsystem Group a member of local administrator group in Exchange 2007 and yet receiving fallowing errors and not seeing OWA directory on your Exchange 2010 server or servers.

If you have not seen how DAG works in Exchange 2010 I recommend downloading Videos made by Scott Schnoll and watch them when you have time.

I think if you deploy DAG which is very easy and start using it, you will appreciate the most and be amazed with its simplicity and power. There are no more complex cluster scenarios, entire process is build into Exchange 2010 and very much seamless to administrators.

Here is real nice script provided by Gene. I made step by step instructions showing what to change in the script to make it work for you. After configuring this script you can have it hosted some internal website and distribute to your users if they need to use RPC & HTTPS or even e-mail them.

Summary: 1 item(s). 0 succeeded, 1 failed.

Elapsed time: 00:00:03

MB3

Failed

Error:

A server-side seed operation has failed. Error: An error occurred while performing the seed operation, which may indicate a problem with the source disk. Error: Failed to open a log truncation context to source mail2. Hresult: 0xc7ff1004. Error: Error returned from an ESE function call (-1305).

[Database: MB3, Server: MAIL5.smtp25.local]

Failed to open a log truncation context to source mail2. Hresult: 0xc7ff1004. Error: Error returned from an ESE function call (-1305).

Exchange Management Shell command attempted:

Elapsed Time: 00:00:03

Some useful information

What is seeding?

Seeding, also known as updating, is the process in which a database, either a blank database or a copy of the production database, is added to the target copy location on another Mailbox server in the same database availability group (DAG) as the production database. This becomes the baseline database for the copy maintained by that server.

Database mobility

New architecture in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 that removes the concept of storage groups and uncouples an Exchange 2010 mailbox database from a Mailbox server

Continuous replication now operates at the database level

Transaction logs are replicated to one or more Mailbox servers

Transaction Logs replayed into one or more copies of a mailbox database stored on those servers.

To be honest first thing I checked was to make sure Exchange server is able to talk to all domain controllers as its configured on its TCP/IP properties.Also as always check to see anything catches your attention under application logs.

Fair enough I was able to locate the event log “2080” MsExchangeADAccess” was showing me one DC only, however the TCP/IP stack was configured to talk to secondary DC.

Make sure Exchange is able to talk to all DC’s within its “Site”

Above example the second DC was not even discovered by MSExchange AD access, due to replication problems existed among the DC’s in the site where exchange is residing. After fixing the relocation issues and restarting MSExchangeADTopology service took care of the error.

Note:

Some other people who had same error assumed to fix this issue by deleting the local profile ( corrupted profile) for the user account they logged into Exchange server.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Now we are ready to move on with installing DAG. The configuration we are doing is very basic here. We will use ForeFront to achieve redundancy for OWA and Outlook anywhere later on, most likely on part 4, for now we will move on finishing the configuration of DAG. As reminder our goal is to bring two exchange 2010 servers in DAG configuration and make our messaging environment redundant, if one server goes down, the other server will pick up the production users. As you know DAG member can be added or taken out from DAG (Data Availability Group) any time. In very basic thinking the way DAG works is to assign active databases and passive databases to each DAG members. Renaming Databases to some sort of meaningful names seems to be the way to go. Remember Storage groups no longer exist in Exchange 2010 and logs are associating with each database.

***IF you go to ADUC you will see computer object called “DAG1” if you go to DNS you will see below A and PTR (if reverse zone exist), after creating the DAG group and assigning IP to it.***

*** We recommend that you use an Exchange 2010 Hub Transport server in the Active Directory site containing the DAG. This allows the witness server and directory to remain under the control of an Exchange administrator.***

*** If the witness server you specify isn't an Exchange 2010 server, you must add the Exchange Trusted Subsystem universal security group to the local Administrators group on the witness server prior to creating the DAG. These security permissions are necessary to ensure that Exchange can create a directory and share on the witness server as needed. ***

*** Hub Transport server that doesn't have the Mailbox server role installed, and it will automatically create the default directory***

Creating DAG

Go to EMC Under organization configuration select

New Data Base Availability Group and fallow the simple wizard.

As you can see the Witness Server and Witness directory is not selected, DAG is configured with a witness server and witness directory, the DAG Wizard will search and locate the HTS server and create everything it needs automatically. (Witness Server = HTS server, Witness Directory will be on the HTS server also)